Well hiring under-qualified candidates purely for the sake of a quota (relating to a protected class) would be illegal in the United States. So its unlikely you will hear anyone explicitly saying that is what they intend to do.
We opened a director level technology position, were encouraged to apply and then we were told explicitly at a company meeting that it was only open to a female PoC (which could only possibly be filled by an outside hire based no our org chart).
I have seen in several UK firms the need for a waiver from HR to hire a white man for middle management level and up. I am not even sure it is legal, but in any case it is openly discriminatory. Imagine if you did that with any other category in the population.
We are here in America, and I was shocked when it happened. But also no lawsuit came of it, because everyone who stood something to lose buys into the idea in the first place.
Well, that’s basically what corporate politics is, with a bit more subtlety. American society is largely run by the same sociopaths that bullied you in high school except now they’re corporate executives and police officers with outsized real power and an education so they understand and can apply the lessons of Machiavelli.
I've heard anecdotes from nonwhite Intel employees who claimed that that was definitely happening there and it meant they could basically only bother to do any work when they felt like it because nobody expected decent productivity out of them anyway.
I don't claim to have remotely enough knowledge of the situation to know whether they were right or not, mind.
It strikes me that your colleagues being acceptable, you being better but having high enough standards for yourself that they don't seem acceptable, plus a moderately apathetic manager could produce pretty much precisely the same observable results and then if you're already primed to expect diversity stuff to be stupidly implemented it'd be easy enough to draw an incorrect conclusion.
It also strikes me that under the previous leadership Intel was kind of a shitshow in general so given that both possibilities seem depressingly plausible.
I’ve heard from white males at Intel that they didn’t need to be productive either. I think this was an Intel problem. But interestingly I suspect POC think it’s about their race. While white males assume this is the case for everyone.
> Now, of course, the talk is of inclusion, not confrontation. And I was surprised to hear Intel—old-fashioned Intel—mentioned as one of the companies successfully innovating around gender. It had been releasing diversity numbers since 2000, though not with as much fanfare as some of its peers, and without much improvement. But in the past couple of years, Intel decided to try a few other approaches, including hiring quotas.
> Well, not quotas. You can’t say quotas. At least not in the United States. In some European countries, like Norway, real, actual quotas—for example, a rule saying that 40 percent of a public company’s board members must be female—have worked well; qualified women have been found and the Earth has continued turning. However, in the U.S., hiring quotas are illegal. “We never use the word quota at Intel,” says Danielle Brown, the company’s chief diversity and inclusion officer. Rather, Intel set extremely firm hiring goals. For 2015, it wanted 40 percent of hires to be female or underrepresented minorities.
> Now, it’s true that lots of companies have hiring goals. But to make its goals a little more, well, quota-like, Intel introduced money into the equation. In Intel’s annual performance-bonus plan, success in meeting diversity goals factors into whether the company gives employees an across-the-board bonus. (The amounts vary widely but can be substantial.) If diversity efforts succeed, everybody at the company gets a little bit richer.
TL;DR: Intel docked your pay unless you met a quota for women and URM hires.
"If women and minorities are not being employed at a rate to be expected given their availability in the relevant labor pool, the contractor's affirmative action program includes specific practical steps designed to address this underutilization."
"Where, pursuant to § 60-2.15, a contractor is required to establish a placement goal for a particular job group, the contractor must establish a percentage annual placement goal at least equal to the availability figure derived for women or minorities, as appropriate, for that job group."